Chinese bookstore Yangzhou Zhongshuge has arguably the most breathtaking bookstore entrance in the world. Read the rest

Miles McDermott is a modern-day millennial hepcat from Phoenix who has set up the most impressive 1960-vintage pad I've seen outside of a soundstage. Read the rest

A commercial airline is no Tardis ("bigger on the inside") but designers and engineers do use several techniques to reduce your claustrophobia in the sky.

Read the rest

See sample pages from this book at Wink.

The Creative Cottage

by Steve Gross and Susan Daley

Gibbs Smith

2016, 160 pages, 8.5 x 11 x 0.8 inches

$25 Buy a copy on Amazon

The Creative Cottage features 13 fabulous small abodes that house collections of many types. Each chapter highlights a cottage that has been rehabilitated by adventurous and artistic homeowners with vision. The cottages are art themselves, with thoughtful architecture, and they are filled with wonderful upcycled, found, and renovated components, both antique and modern blended together, feeling curated and purposeful as opposed to random and slap-dash. The creative souls behind them are artists, pickers, and normal folks too, who just needed someplace more special to live.

The text reads like a menu in a fancy restaurant, in which every ingredient has a special designation, treatment, and provenance. The painting from the lobby of an old theater in upstate New York. A salvaged stained-glass window. A zinc rain barrel holding antique canes. A soapstone sink from a high school lab. A red vinyl 1940s barbershop chair. Striped tea towels hung on a twig. A 1930s school locker sponge, painted to look like wood. A bed platform made from painted license plates and metal Alabama road signs. Sculptures fashioned from beaver-chewed wood.

Even if you’re not planning on renovating the shotgun shack on the back forty or the tiny abandoned building by the edge of the local harbor, the photographs are fun to look at. Finding each ingredient discussed within the accompanying photographs is like playing Where’s Waldo with 19th-century furniture and Barbershop ads from Nigeria. Read the rest

CES attendee Kusmeroglu archived the beautiful carpets to be found at the convention centers, halls and hotel walkways over which the electronics show sprawls. [via Dean Putney]

For @deanputney I documented all the carpets I saw in Vegas during CES: https://t.co/FXODIQFTTZ

— Kusmeroglu (@Kusmeroglu) January 11, 2016

Previously: Carpets of CES, 2011 edition. The Best Free Pens of CES Read the rest

Feathr produces digitally printed, on-demand wallpaper, and they even occasionally take submissions from interested artists through open calls and bespoke commissions. Read the rest

Every retailer has the right to lower prices to drive interest. Read the rest

Stasi -- Secret Rooms is a 10-year project by Daniel and Geo Fuchs, who took beautiful, striking photos of the stark interiors of the spaces used by the Stasi, the terrifying secret police from the former East Germany. Read the rest

Excellent vortex illusion carpet in the video game department at Paris's Fnac La Défense entertainment retailer. Photo from Alex Korting's Flickr stream. (via Superpunch) Read the rest